Fin: Armond White vs. the Swifties, the secret lives of Philly T-shirt vendors, and why you don't have to post about Israel
News and notes from Philly, as #PFF32 gets underway
The Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour movie is now out in theaters. It’s a big hit and it seems like the Swifties all loved it.
Critic Armond White, it would appear, is not a Swiftie. And as is his wont, White’s review implied not so much that he disliked the film, but rather that it’s a sign of insipient cultural decline.
I do admit to a soft spot for White and his one-of-a-kind style, going back to his days in the legendary New York Press film section, although I liked his stuff better when he didn’t include right-wing easter eggs that you have to watch Sean Hannity every night to understand.
Alas, Armond’s review of The Eras Tour film, in National Review, is abject madness. The subhead is “A movie concert promotes post-Madonna, post-Obama mind control,” and it’s all downhill from there, including a dismissal of the director Sam Wrench: “He’s no Leni Riefenstahl” (this is meant, I think, as an insult.)
It’s tragic that the media perpetuate Swift’s insensitivity and tastelessness. Parents should be concerned about Swift grooming their kids into cynicism and selfishness. The teens in TikTok clips who pitifully bounce and sing along with the film’s pre-recorded concert are the flip side of those nerds and sociopaths who lined up for The Dark Knight Rises in Aurora, Colo. Boomer parents may want to let them have their fun — same as toying with matches and playing in the traffic. But here’s a frightening fact of the Swifties pheenom: These kids seem ready for a leader, anxious for totalitarianism. It will take a counterrevolution to repair Swift’s moral, aesthetic, and political damage.
So he’s saying that the people who lined up to see The Dark Knight Rises were the villains in the Aurora shooting, as opposed to the guy who shot them?
I’m just excited for the Swifties to be introduced to the work of Armond White. Football was nothing.
Has Camille Paglia ever said or written anything about Taylor Swift, or did Lady Gaga’s career give her enough material to retire from pop punditry? I think only she could come up with something that touches Armond.
No, you don’t have to post online about Israel to still be my friend
As the horrors in Israel and Palestine continue into a third week, things show no sign of getting any better. For now, we hope and pray for peace and understanding, and for my part, I’ll focus on an extremely esoteric pet peeve about one aspect of the situation.
A lot of my friends have been sharing a blog post, this week, by Josh Gilman, with the title “Why you might have lost all your Jewish friends this week and didn’t even know it.” Gilman’s complaint — echoing a sentiment shared in the last two weeks by lots of my Jewish-American friends — is that not enough of his friends posted online after the killings in Israel by Hamas. Gilman:
But… here is what your Jewish friends are wondering right now. So, why didn’t you post… this time? And that’s not an accusatory, WHY DIDN’T YOU POST!? It’s a genuine question. Because they need to know the answer Maybe you didn’t post something because you are ignorant about what took place….
But here’s the other thing: it just takes one. One message, one post. The greatest soothing to my soul this past week has been seeing friends and old colleagues post notes of support. It truly means the world. It’s not too late. But consider this carefully, because it is not a game. If you read this and choose to reach out, choose to take a stand publicly. Choose to put your own reputation on the line and maybe even take some of the hatred toward the Jewish people and Israel for yourself. If you do this, we may believe you.
I… don’t feel this way. And not only because I don’t think my feelings at the present moment are what’s most important, with rockets and bombs falling and killing people in large numbers on the other side of the world. Amy Schumer, it appears, feels differently.
I trust my non-Jewish friends to not, say, turn me over to the Nazis should it come to that; if I didn’t, then they wouldn’t be my friends. But the last thing on Earth I’m concerned about right now is who did or didn’t post something on Facebook. I don’t think that’s an accurate or meaningful measure of whether someone has my back as a person or as a Jew; how they behave in real life, rather than online, is a much better indication.
Here’s what that demand says (in my own words): "You must make a public statement, right now, and it must comport exactly to what I want said about the single most contentious subject on the planet. And if you word any part of that wrong — or even worse, say nothing at all — I'll never trust or speak to you again, because it means you don’t value me as a person.”
That is NOT a fair demand to make of your friends! And making that same demand of corporations, brands or institutions isn’t any more reasonable!
This is especially true at a time when it’s a daily occurrence for people to get fired because they posted something about the Middle East, and somebody saw it, didn’t like it, and immediately emailed their boss.
I liked what Elisabeth Spiers, the former editor of Gawker, had to say on the New York Times op-ed page this week, “I Don’t Have to Post About My Outrage. Neither Do You.”:
There’s a facile version of taking a stand on social media that generates righteous back patting but reduces complex issues to a simple yes or no. Taking simplistic stands can also lead to twisting words. Concern for Palestinians is portrayed as support for Hamas or hatred toward Israel or Jews in general. Anger about Hamas’s deadly attacks on Israeli citizens — or any mention of antisemitism — is portrayed as denigrating the dignity of all Palestinian lives. This kind of thinking is deeply unserious and further fuels hostilities, warping nuanced positions into extremism and mistaking tweet-length expressions of outrage for brave action in the face of atrocity.
Remembering the news days of Natalee Holloway
On Wednesday, news broke that Joran van der Sloot had confessed to the murder of Natalee Holloway, the American teenager who was killed in Aruba in 2005. Her remains, however, are likely to never be found.
I watched CNN for much of the afternoon Wednesday and this wasn’t much covered, amid the Israel news, as well as the chaos on Capitol Hill. And it reminded me just how much cable news has changed over the last two decades.
At the time of the Holloway case, and those of Chandra Levy, Laci Peterson, and a few others, cable news would just spend hours at a time covering murders and missing person cases- but only, of course, when the victim was a beautiful young white woman. David Fincher’s Gone Girl brilliantly satirized all different aspects of this, starting with its direct parody of the odious news anchor Nancy Grace. I think that script had more contempt for Grace than for murder and infidelity put together.
True crime has since been shunted off to podcasts and streaming services, where these cases can instead be dissected into 10-part documentaries while cable news is all-politics, all the time, with the occasional hurricane or insurrection mixed in.
But some aspects of this have remained. Amid Donald Trump’s immigration and crime rhetoric, it was always clear that he treated the deaths of beautiful women as a greater tragedy than those of anyone else. And in the photos shared of the missing dead on both sides of the war in Israel, I’ve noticed, that beautiful ladies have often been emphasized.
The secret lives of Philadelphia’s parking lot T-shirt vendors
There are a few story ideas I’ve always had in the back of my mind to write, and one of those is to interview the guys who sell bootleg t-shirts in the parking lot of Philadelphia’s sports complex. I had a lot of questions- who supplies and designs the shirts? Are the teams and leagues okay with this? Is there a cartel of t-shirt vendors, or is it every man for himself?
This week, the Philadelphia Inquirer’s Jason Nark beat me to the idea, talking to a Phillies t-shirt vendor amid the team’s World Series run, the pseudonymous “T-Shirt Phil.” It’s good stuff, including his note that the Taylor Swift shows at the Linc this summer were among his most profitable days of the year. He even answered some questions I would have had:
The bulk of the merchandise comes from someone higher up the food chain, T-Shirt Phil said, and while he doesn’t design them, he offers advice. Anything with old images of Veterans Stadium on it, red, or kelly green, sells well. Slogans like “brotherly shove” and “dancing on my own” do well, too.
So I was sad to see, just a couple of days later, that Philadelphia Licenses and Inspections had been “busy the last 2 nights busting unlicensed vendors at the South Philly Sports Complex,” in the words of Fox 29’s Chris O’Connell. The raids included everything from food and water to, yes, T-shirts.
Doesn’t L&I have better things to do with its limited resources these days than enforce the monopoly power of the sports teams to sell shirts and food at their venues? It’s not like they don’t sell tons of them, because of the 43,000 people at each Phillies playoff game, I’m guessing about 40,000 of them are wearing official team merchandise (the other 3,000 are wearing, you guessed it, official Eagles stuff.)
No word on whether T-Shirt Phil made it through the busts unscathed, but he did say in the piece that he’s been busted many times before.
What is a Midwesterner?
My friend Craig Calcaterra, on his Cup of Coffee Substack earlier this week, shared the following map, which came from legitimate polling by Emerson:
I grew up in Minnesota, and agree with the 96.5 percent of my countrymen that it is indeed a Midwestern state- and also that it’s about 18 percent more Midwestern than Craig’s adopted home state of Ohio. And you probably have to live in Erie to believe that Pennsylvania is the Midwest.
However, Minnesota’s categorization has been a little more complicated over the years. When I was growing up in the ‘80s, it was a common thing to refer to Minnesota as “the Northwest” or “The Great Northwest,” I’m guessing it harkened back to the part of the late 19th century when Minnesota was a state but some of the Westword places were not yet. Because of that, there were a lot of “Northwest” businesses based in the Twin Cities — Northwest Airlines, Norwest Bank, Northwest Swim, and Health Clubs — with that in their names.
I haven’t heard anyone use “The Northwest” to describe Minnesota in many years, and those companies have all been merged out of existence. It’s been either “The Midwest” or “The Upper Midwest” for the last 30 years. Except…
Of late, there’s been an effort to refer to Minnesota not as “The Midwest” but rather “The North.” It’s been the sports teams, especially the Timberwolves and Wild driving it, presumably as a homage to Game of Thrones. After all, as denizens of a very cold place, who usually end up losing the big battles, Minnesota’s sports teams have a great deal in common with House Stark.
I also thought the “We the North” stuff may have had something to do with the 2016 election:
This week’s writings
This week here at The SS Ben Hecht, I reviewed Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour and managed to do so without comparing the director to Leni Riefenstahl a single time. I also reviewed the documentaries The Mission and The Insurrectionist Next Door, as well as Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon. I previewed the 2023 Philadelphia Film Festival, which started last night.
I also watched a Zoom press conference with Marty himself, which was very much preferable to every single Zoom call in the entire year 2020.
Over at Living Life Fearless, I wrote about how sick I am of the Scorsese vs. Marty stuff.
Also this week, I reviewed The Burial, and Anatomy of a Fall, for Splice Today.
For 19FortyFive, I wrote about why the other day’s Capitol office building protest was not like January 6, and Sidney Powell’s flipping on Donald Trump.
This week: It’s PFF time! I’ll be writing up my reviews of the festival films here and elsewhere, and look for me at the venues. I’ll also be doing the usual festival megathread on Twitter/X, so follow me over there, if you don’t already. Also, my reviews since 2008 are all up on Rotten Tomatoes, and I log all my movie viewings on Letterboxd. And what the heck, follow me on Bluesky too.
As always, thank you for your support.